[ECOS] Store NPE MAC address on flash

[VictorLai at aaeon dot com dot tw]

Dear all,
Thanks for the help.

I am doing design on IXP425. We are currently using redboot 1.94 +
MontaVista 3.1 for our development. We'd like to store MAC address on flash
to save the eeprom. I found a document on Intel's Redboot's Application
Note: "Customizing RedBoot How-To's." Document Number:254308-001. It
mentioned that it is doable and is achivable from Coyote* Gateway Reference
Design (GRG).

Questions:
1. I can not find this support in ecos CVS release or anywhere on-line, can
anyone tell me where to get it?

2. I am also doing it on my own if the solution is not available. I wrote a
file in to flash contains 2 sets of MAC address. I want to modify the code
"ixdp425_misc.c" to read the MAC data in flash memory  when redboot read
the MAC address in EEPROM and not finding it. I think it should be just a
simple procedure of loading the file "ex: fis load MAC_Addr" and the read
it out from flash. I found the code to access the flash memory is in
flash.c under packages/redboot/ whiel ixdp425_misc.c is in packages/hal/. I
am having problem accessing the function in flash.c from ixdp425_misc.c.
Question: What is a right way to access the flash memory in package/hal
folder? Do I need to rewrite a module to do such thing?


This is the portion of the application note which mentioned it:
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5.8Do I Need to Use the EEPROM?

This is specific to designs based closely on the IXDP425 platform;
therefore, using the EEPROM depends on your board design. If you plan to
use EEPROM connected via I2C in your system, then the support is already
enabled in RedBoot and is used to store the MAC address for the NPEs. So if
you only plan to use the EEPROM for storing the MAC addresses, then you may
want to evaluate alternative locations for storing the MAC address. e.g.,
in flash instead of EEPROM.What are the trade-offs?1.With EEPROM, you have
BOM costs and GPIO consumed. This is the default RedBoot support.2.Flash ¡V
uses the configuration space in RedBoot (extended). RedBoot must be
modified to use flash for this. A model for how to do this is already in
the Coyote gateway platform support package, but is NOT a configurable
option, so modifications are required in non-Coyote board systems.If you do
use the EEPROM, you can reclaim the GPIO used to access EEPROM.If you want
to modify the location (offset) at which the MAC address is stored, the
EEPROM is support is provided in the
filepackages/hal/arm/xscale/IXDP425/current/src/ixdp425_misc.c

Note:To store the MAC address in the flash, the ixdp425_misc.c module needs
to be updated, removing the existing EEPROM support and updating the code
to extend the platform configuration in the fconfig structure. Refer to the
GRG source for a model on how to modify your source to add this feature.
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Thanks,

Victor